Abdus Salam

The Theoretical Physics group at Imperial College was founded in 1957 when the then head of physics, Lord Patrick Blackett, persuaded Abdus Salam to leave Cambridge and come to Imperial. This was celebrated in 2007 with the ‘’Salam+50’’ conference. Salam remained as Professor of Theoretical Physics until his death in 1996. His death was a great loss not only to his family and the scientific community; it was a loss to all mankind. For he was not only one of the finest physicists of the twentieth century, having unified two of the four fundamental forces of nature, but he dedicated his life to the betterment of science and education in the developing world. In 1964 he founded the International Physics Center in Trieste dedicated to this goal and which now bears his name. In 1979 he shared the nobel Prize with Glashow and Weinberg for the unification of the weak an electromagnetic forces. I was a PhD student in the group from 1969 to 1972 and my thesis was devoted to winning a bet that Salam had taken out with Sir Herman Bondi that you could describe black holes using the technique of Feynman diagrams.

From 2006 to 2015 I was privileged to occupy the Abdus Salam Chair of Theoretical Physics.